In the course of the extremely anticipated launch of Apple’s iPhone 16 on September 9, scammers flooded YouTube with dwell streams that featured AI-generated variations of Apple CEO Tim Cook dinner.
These streams had been used to advertise crypto scams, deceiving viewers into pondering they might double their cash by sending crypto to a fraudulent deal with.
One of many rip-off streams, shared on X (previously generally known as Twitter), featured deepfakes of Tim Cook dinner encouraging viewers to ship Tether (USDT), Bitcoin (BTC), and Ether (ETH) to a so-called “contribution deal with.”
Do you know?
Need to get smarter & wealthier with crypto?
Subscribe – We publish new crypto explainer movies each week!
Easy methods to Use Crypto? 5 Rewarding Methods Defined (Animated)
The pretend Cook dinner assured viewers that Apple would ship again double the quantity of cryptocurrency they deposited. Nonetheless, in actuality, the scammers stole the funds.
One notably convincing pretend stream was hosted on a YouTube channel that gave the impression to be affiliated with Apple and had a verification checkmark, making it extra plausible to viewers.
Screenshots and movies shared on X revealed that a few of these rip-off streams amassed a whole lot of hundreds of views. Nonetheless, it is suspected that many of those views had been generated by bots.
YouTube’s help group shortly acknowledged the difficulty, posting on X to induce customers to report any fraudulent movies. As of now, the pretend dwell streams have been faraway from YouTube, and the accounts related to these scams have been shut down.
These streams occurred throughout Apple’s official “Glowtime” occasion that was live-streamed on YouTube, the place the corporate revealed its newest iPhone 16 fashions.
This incident highlights the growing use of deepfake expertise by scammers, who are actually concentrating on high-profile figures and occasions to make their schemes extra convincing.
This isn’t the primary time such scams have surfaced; again in June, deepfake movies of Elon Musk selling an identical crypto scheme appeared on YouTube across the time of SpaceX’s Starship rocket launch.
Gode is a Web3 Market Analyst who researches crucial trade occasions and interprets how they have an effect on the broader Web3 house. Her formal training in media tradition & digital rhetoric permits her to make use of a methodical strategy to evaluating important Web3 information knowledge, together with large-scale occasions and the broader social sentiment inside the ecosystem.Gode is a mutilingual skilled, having studied in a number of universities all throughout Europe. This permits her to have a one-of-a-kind alternative to research Web3 social sentiments spanning totally different cultures and languages and, in flip, develop a a lot deeper understanding of how the Web3 house is rising inside totally different communities. With the remainder of her group, Gode works to determine essential crypto information patterns and supply unbiased and data-driven info.Gode’s passions embrace working and speaking with folks, and when she’s not researching Web3 information, she spends her time touring and watching true crime documentaries.
